About Seeking Alpha

Seeking Alpha is a platform for investment research, with broad coverage of stocks, asset classes, ETFs and investment strategy. In contrast to other equity research platforms, insight is provided by investors and industry experts rather than sell-side analysts. Seeking Alpha has three outstanding characteristics:

Breadth: Seeking Alpha has remarkably broad coverage of stocks, including more than 4,000 small and mid cap stocks covered in the past year.

Depth: With over 10,000 contributing authors and 280,000+ commenters, insight and discussion are informed and sophisticated.

Influence: Seeking Alpha articles frequently move stocks, due to a large and influential readership which includes money managers, business leaders, journalists and bloggers.

Audience and Traffic

Seeking Alpha has 4M registered users (48% YOY growth) and roughly 3.5M users who have created portfolios to track analysis of stocks they follow and exchange investment ideas.

Over 18.5% of the audience are financial professionals.

7 MM average monthly unique visitors in the past year.

85 MM average monthly page views in the past year.

Average time spent per visit: 13:18 Minutes (28:06 minutes per registered user’s visit.)

In the past year, those 2.4M real-time alert users added a total of over 7.3M individual real-time email alerts to their accounts.

The average real-time email alert subscriber has 6 tickers for analysis or breaking news.

User Engagement

Beyond the fundamental research and deep dive analysis published daily, the quality of discourse in the comments section is outstanding. Seeking Alpha users frequently participate in discussions and offer different perspectives, alternative insights, and often suggest helpful corrections or point out flaws in an author’s argument. Many Seeking Alpha users say that what they value most about our platform is the commentary.

User engagement on the articles is very high:

On average, there are 120,000 new comments on Seeking Alpha articles every month.

This means, 6,000 comments are added per business day, averaging 23 comments per article.

High quality commenters- investors with a wide diversity of opinions discuss and debate investments together.

Comment moderation decisions are made by our 24-hour in-house moderation team at Seeking Alpha.

All new users start out in moderation, and most move quickly to unmoderated posting once we have been able to assess the quality of their site contributions (typically after three comments).

Influence

An academic study, published in December of 2013 by the universities of Cornell, Hong Kong, Purdue, and Georgia Institute of Technology examined seven years of stock analysis on Seeking Alpha and found that the opinions expressed in both Seeking Alpha articles and comments are predictive of future stock returns and earnings surprises over all time frames studied: one month, three months, six months, one year and three years. Notable quotes from the study:

“In the end, all of the findings presented in this study point to this usefulness and value relevance of peer-based advice in the investment domain, and they hint at the possibility that social-media outlets specializing in financial markets may eventually mirror the development of other “bottom-up knowledge generators” such as Wikipedia and the way they have changed how information is produced, evaluated, and disseminated.”

Content - Opinion & Analysis

Seeking Alpha unlocks the world’s investing insight and makes it accessible to anyone actively seeking new ideas. In total, Seeking Alpha has published analysis and breaking news on more than 12,780 companies, including 2,969 tickers whose companies' primary listing are outside the U.S., representing 69 foreign markets.

Opinion & Analysis is our bread and butter. Leveraging our crowdsourced contributor network of over 10,000 analysts, buy-siders, and industry experts we are able to publish analysis on more companies than any other independent research provider. Seeking Alpha's crowdsourced model offers greater breadth, depth and opportunity than traditional sell-side coverage. We receive over 600 submissions a day and after editorial review approximately 200-250 get published each business day.This means we produce roughly 5,200 analysis pieces monthly. If you're interested in becoming a contributor, here's how.

Top Themes

Long Ideas, Short Ideas: Clearly articulated, actionable analysis of a single stock or ETF, often from authors with positions in the stocks they're analyzing. 40% of all articles published are long or short ideas, with 3 long ideas for every 1 short. (Long example, Short example)

One of the most important aspects of our platform is that we can cover the long tail of stocks, where other research firms and investment banks cannot. Here is a breakdown of our content makeup by market capitalization:

Mega Cap (200B +): 8%

Large Cap (10-200B): 39.4%

Mid Cap (2-10B): 20.9%

Small Cap (300M-2B): 16.2%

Micro Cap (50-300M): 8.3%

21% of all pageviews to our quote pages are on micro and small cap tickers. That number is even higher in terms of content consumed: 35% of all article and transcript pageviews are on an article or transcript that includes a micro or small cap ticker.

Content - Breaking News

Breaking News is our real-time feed of market news and commentary. It's produced in-house by a team of editors, each of whom focuses on their own market sector to provide expert commentary. We publish around 200 of these short-form posts each day (a headline with 2-5 bullet points), with actionable, need-to-know information about your investments. What differentiates us from competitors isn't simply the breadth of breaking news items but the follow-up coverage. This includes additional color around major company developments, implications for competitors and supply chains, "under the radar" stories that aren't being discussed elsewhere, and a close pulse on what's moving markets and why.

On the Move: The latest market moving news (stocks seeing a substantial gain or loss on news, whether during market hours, premarket or postmarket).

Consumer

Tech

Financial

ETFs

Coverage - Number of stocks

In the past year we published breaking news on over 8,400 stocks.

Content - Transcripts

Seeking Alpha is the largest free provider of earnings conference call transcripts. Our in-house transcripts team provides over 4,500 of these transcripts each quarter, and that number is set to rise in 2015. Our extensive provision of transcripts allows our users to quickly reference a company's most recent earnings call for research purposes, as well as years of historical transcripts. We also allow users to search for themes or key terms throughout Seeking Alpha's entire transcript universe, so that a user can search for "social media" or "Facebook" and see every time one of those terms is mentioned in a competitor's earnings call transcript. The transcripts are widely read by financial professionals as well as displayed on major partners like Bloomberg, Factset, and NASDAQ.

Seeking Alpha PRO

Seeking Alpha PRO is an exclusive platform for fundamental investors and buy-side professionals. It offers access to a research library with over 9,800 small-cap research reports and Top Ideas. From a risk management point of view, users receive a 24 hour early access to key articles before they are released to our community of free subscribers. On average, 15-20 articles are published per day.

Sector Breakdown

Services 19.9%

Basic Materials 19%

Technology 16.9%

Financial 14.8%

Healthcare 11.5%

Consumer Goods 8.1%

Industrial Goods 7.9%

Utilities 1.3%

Conglomerates 0.3%

Market Capitalization Breakdown

Large Cap (10-200B): 5%

Mid Cap (2-10B): 24%

Small Cap (300M -2B): 38%

Micro Cap (50-300M): 23%

Nano Cap (Below 50M) : 10%

Top Themes

Top Ideas: The most actionable long or short ideas on Seeking Alpha, primarily on stocks that have a catalyst on the horizon and present an asymmetric risk/reward opportunity. 84% of Top Ideas are on micro or small cap stocks, with 3 long Top Ideas for every 1 short Top Idea.

PRO articles: Our contributors' best research on small- and mid-cap stocks. These articles are typically on undercovered stocks that have little to no sell-side coverage.

Coverage - Number of stocks

In total, 4,679 stocks are analyzed in the PRO platform (as of November 2014).